aLLie

This assignment was pretty easy. I had already written it, I just needed to tweek it enough to be good enough for turning in. Take a moment of occasion in life that made you think, and write about it. Hence the result...

During the spring semester in 2006, I was attending the extension of USU in Blanding, Utah. In the technology building, there is a huge oak table with chairs all around it. This was my favorite spot to go and work on my homework before I had class. One beautiful, warm spring day I was sitting there and a lady I knew walked in the door. She walked down the hall and into the USU classrooms. I didn’t really think anything of it then, but when she walked by a few minutes later I paid more attention to her. She was fumbling around in her rather large purse looking for, what I assumed, were her keys. Just before she reached out to open the door, I heard her more than sigh then say, “This just isn’t my day.”

There’s few times in my life when I really take a trip on thoughts. I don’t really have time. However, it was between working on Sociology and thinking this through, so of course I had a few minutes of contemplation. What makes it your day? Is it a good grade? Good luck? Does it involve the word good? Does everything have to go perfectly to be your day? Do only a few bad things make the day not yours? Where does that put Mondays? Does waking up on the weekday directly after a weekend make it a bad day? What if Monday came in the middle of the week? Thoughts kept infiltrating my once frazzled brain. I couldn’t sort anything out, and I sure wasn’t making sense to myself.

I couldn’t really come to a conclusion, except that as human beings, if something goes wrong we have to blame it on the day. We think to ourselves, or say aloud, “This isn’t my day, so nothing will go right!” Perhaps we don’t want to take credit for bad things that happen to us, so we’re more prone to put the blame on something else. Of course this theory doesn’t make sense when reversed. We like to take credit for good things. Don’t we? The problem that really seemed to bother me just didn’t make sense. Since when did people start assigning days? How many other humans on this planet aren’t having a good day? How about those that are having good days? Is it just the little bad things that makes us have a bad day, or can it be just one big disaster?

My favorite book is Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. Her heroine writes to the trustee that is paying for her to attend college about bad days. “It isn’t the big troubles in life that require character. Anybody can rise to a crisis and face a crushing tragedy with courage, but to meet the petty hazards of the day with a laugh – I really think that requires spirit!” I love this idea. How many of us can make it through some catastrophe and say “This isn’t my day?” But how many of us can say, “This hasn’t been the best day for me, but it still can be! Because I’m not one to let a few things get me down!”

To quote Meg Ryan’s character in You’ve Got Mail – “I don’t really want an answer; I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void.” And that’s how it is; I don’t think that I really want answers. Perhaps knowing that in each of us lies the power to change. Instead of sighing and sadly saying, “This isn’t my day.” Perhaps we should just toss the little things into the wind and walk away laughing, just enough to make Miss Jerusha Abbott proud.